


and all who still remain are whispering in the dark

by Euregatto



Category: Dorohedoro
Genre: (checks notes) I think, Canon-Typical Violence, Eventual Smut, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Necromancy and Hand Jobs and Angst oh my, just not all in the same scene
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:54:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25295014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euregatto/pseuds/Euregatto
Summary: “I know you’re up to no good...again.”“And what would make you say that, Senpai?” Noi asks innocently, brushing dust from the world’s oldest necronomicon and dropping it into a haggard-looking box labelled E.S.F.L.C (or, En’s Stupid Fucking Lexicon Collection).a series of connected Shinoi shorts
Relationships: Noi/Shin (Dorohedoro)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 135





	1. healer

**Author's Note:**

> Binged this show the other day and decided to do something to express my absolute adoration for it because I have a lot of feelings for Noi and Shin. I'm around chapter 60 in the manga right now, and (insert fluorescent *disclaimer* sign here) my characterization of them leans heavily towards their manga counterparts out of personal preference. The fic itself weaves between the time gaps mainly focused in the first season of the anime/adjacent storyline in the manga.
> 
> I've always wanted to do something involving a collection of vinaigrettes or short/micro fiction pieces that tell a bigger story, so if you have the time, let me know what you think!
> 
> Enjoy!

* * *

“I know you’re up to no good... _again_.”

“And what would make you say that, Senpai?” Noi asks innocently, brushing dust from the world’s oldest necronomicon and dropping it into a haggard-looking box labelled E.S.F.L.C (or, En’s Stupid Fucking Lexicon Collection).

“You didn’t answer my texts.”

The Archives are humming with energy: a byproduct of magic being methodically cast and refined, smoke secreted from pores like sweat and left to transfix and transform whatever it falls upon at will. Shin leans against the worn shelves of the case behind Noi’s workstation and feels the threat of splinters under his shoulder blade. The table she likes to use sits in the laser-focused beam of midday sun that pours in from the skylight. He consciously stands in the shadow around it to avoid sweating to death.

Noi continues to bask, a certainty he can always rely on: she’s a fucking weirdo who likes the heat. “I was digging up some information on undoing decay,” she tells him. And, “You’re so clingy, Senpai. I don’t have to answer you all the time.”

“Guess I’m going to lunch by myself, then.”

“W-Wait a sec—Senpai—!”

Thirty minutes later they end up in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in town between a magics shop and a theatre they’ve been to only once before. True to form, or by extension of a refined habit they’d fallen into back when she was still encased like a bullet, they sit by the window and plow through a three-course meal.

“What’s with the sudden interest in necromancy?” he asks after, while she’s busy working at her slice of Black Forest cake. “Isn’t that a kind of magic only life-givers can use?”

“Well—yes, mostly.” She lifts her eyes to meet his. “Is there someone you would bring back, if you could?”

“Hypothetically?”

“Potentially.”

He thinks her question sounds loaded but picks it open anyways, like an itchy scab half-grown over a wound. “No, not really. Violating the laws of death isn't exactly out of the ordinary here, either, but you’re talking about something worse, aren’t you?”

“N-No! Nothing like that!”

He says, “Don’t lie to your Senpai.”

Noi sets her fork on the plate and he attempts to decipher the unusually placid expression on her face. _En must have said something_ , Shin thinks, unconsciously tensing. She’s off an octave and that only comes from concern for self-preservation—something which Shin wouldn’t recognize in himself because he’d always executed his decisions in the service of someone else’s.

To confirm his suspicions: “En thinks I have an untapped potential with my magic. I'm trying to heal Ebisu, and I might be able to undo her zombification if her flesh isn’t too far gone. Normally, there must be _some_ living tissue for me to work with, but if I manage to do it without _any_ living tissue, perhaps I could..."

Shin had learned in his first month after eradicating the association that the Sorcerer’s World exists in moral opposition to Hole: the violation of death isn’t about the humanity in any of them.

“You’re thinking you could practice to be someone similar to a life-giver?” he asks.

“I don't know.”

He wants to prod but knows it isn’t funny, so he takes his fork and steals a bite of her cake. 

“Hey!”

“You weren’t eating it,” he says, and is relieved to find her gaze has softened away from the crimson glow of anticipation, reflecting the string of thoughts in her mind. He scoops another piece from her plate. “You gonna tell me what kind of life-magic you were hoping to find in a necronomicon?”

_“That,”_ she says, “was out of my own curiosity.”

They pay for their food and don’t speak again until they return to the Archives. Shin finds that the shadow has extended over the desk now as the sun begins to descend from the sky. He curiously reaches into E.S.F.L.C. and pulls out the leather-bound tome to find that its cover is stitched from dried sorcerers' flesh.

There’s a lot he can decide to do in this situation: logically he should slice the book into slivers, but part of him is fighting the urge to walk away and through the doors and across town to the restaurant that makes delicious cheese-filled croissants to await the inevitable combustion of En's estate through Noi’s botched esoteric rituals, and he could always, he doesn’t know—put her on the table and fuck her with his tongue until she taps out, or something. Anything to distract her from whatever no-good scheme she’s formulated today.

Instead, he sets it in her open palms when she makes the gesture.

“I’ll leave you to it,” he says, waving her off with a flick of his wrist. “Don’t do anything dangerous without me, all right?”

“Of course not, Senpai!”

Surprising to exactly no one, Shin isn't reassured. He can’t articulate why; he just really, _really_ doesn’t like the look of that book in her hands.


	2. toolbox

* * *

“I need my toolbox.”

It’s not really a suggestion, more just a statement falling short of a suggestion to fill the quiet. His voice sounds loud and clear but he figures Noi hasn’t heard him because she doesn’t immediately reply and instead exuberantly occupies her face with a spoonful of the same chocolate ice cream he told her a mere three-and-a-half minutes ago was the only off-limits snack in the entire fucking apartment. Gura-Gura is sitting at her feet with eyes wide as dinner plates.

“Noi,” Shin says, and this time she hums, indicating that she’s listening. “Are you dense?”

“Oh! Sorry, Senpai. Were you saying something?”

“Pass me my toolbox.”

Noi hefts the crate of shit from its inappropriate place on the kitchen counter and sets it on the table within arm’s reach. The tools aren’t organized and neither are the boxes of nails and it all viciously clangs together in the confines of the old painting crate, the kind of disorganization his old boss in the lumber mill would have docked his paycheck over while citing a mentally conjured list of damages to business property. 

Noi says, “Doesn’t your back hurt from leaning over all the time, Senpai?”

“Not really.” He considers his improper form all the same: it doesn’t bother him Right Now, but he spends so much time at his trade that he assumes the possibility of developing a hunch will increase in his later years anyway. It’s just one of those facts of life he’s come to accept, like being Noi’s partner, or how quickly oil settles out of peanut butter. “If you’re going to eat my expensive ice cream, at least have the decency to use a napkin.”

There’s a smudge of chocolate cream at the corner of her lips. “Well, you said I could help myself to anything in your place! And not to be a stranger, and—”

“Yes, I did say those every single one of those things at some point in time. Only Hell knows why.”

“You can’t take it back.” 

Shin frowns. Adverse to the uncaged brutality when he wields it most days, his hammer tamely raps the flathead nail into the juncture of the wood, but Noi’s successfully distracted him from his task of restoring the old kitchen table anyway, so his rhythm is all wrong.

He mutters, “Fuck it,” then surrenders to his stomach and joins her by the counter, wedging a spoon into the tub and uprooting a chunk of frozen caramel in the process. He notes the way her eyes skate left to right, taking in the haphazard disarray his apartment has become since he recently revisited his old occupation. She makes a non-committal noise in her throat.

“You really need to clean this place up.”

“I will once I finish the table.” He considers it. “And the new desk I want to put in my room.”

“Oh, you know? We should build something together, Senpai! Like a house! No magic, just some wood and good ol’ fashioned elbow grease!”

“A house sounds expensive,” he replies simply, though there’s a complexity to true financial stability. There’s also the matter of wiring, the methods of building supports and stairs, the hidden places he could make behind the walls. Hollow areas for hiding secrets.

“So? En will pay for it.”

“That defeats the purpose, Noi.” Shin absently thumbs at the corner of her lip to wipe away that glaring smudge of chocolate. An impulsive motion. One of vulnerability. The kind of physical testament to how long he’s known her that she doesn’t flinch away or break his hand on reflex. His tongue swipes the cream off his finger before he even registers the underhanded intimate nature of it. “You have to use _your own_ resources.”

“Like it matters?” she asks, and he gives her a look.

“Of course it does! It’s about making something that’s just... _yours_. No one can hold it over your head, or tell you you owe them interest. If it’s going to be yours you can’t afford to share it with anyone else.”

Noi seems to mull over his words before wedging another bite into her mouth. “Oh. I guess that’s okay, then. You’ll build a house with me, won’t you, Senpai?”

It’s like everything he’s just said went in one ear and slid out the other. Her mind is strange, though he’s always known that. In their first year he wanted to put the claw of his hammer through the back of her head and strip the fragments of bone away until he uncovered the source of her ego.

“Aren’t you listening to me? Building houses is an expensive ordeal.”

“Is that a no?”

He sighs. “I’ll think about it, okay?”

Noi lifts her arms in triumph and startles Gura-Gura by proximity, sending the dog scampering under the table. She says, “You’re the greatest Senpai I’ve ever had!”

“I’m the _only_ Senpai you’ve ever had. Are you cheating on me with another Senpai, Noi?”

She fists her cotton shirt above her heart, feigning injury. He subconsciously mimics her motion. “I would _never!”_

Cloud cover moves away from the sky. Sunlight falls into the kitchen and lances through the veil of sawdust dispersing into the air. Shin notes the spring warmth on his back, the familiar heat of Noi’s body near his. The coldness on his tongue contrasts how bright he feels suddenly, enveloped in the yolk-yellow light and his partner’s own glowing aura, and a secondhand memory comes to him: his father hunched over a station in a long-ago time in a long-ago place, deftly notching wood in the mid-noon sun.

“Shin.” Noi doesn’t ever use his name, not like that, and not without the proper suffix attached. It means she’s taking him seriously. “Whatever we choose to do. Or make. It will be _ours_ , right?”

“Yeah,” he says. He tastes chocolate and sunlight everywhere in his mouth. “Ours.”


	3. rivalry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A light-hearted chapter; I actually wasn't going to post this, but I'm still recovering from being horrendously sick (curse these heinous allergies to everything that identifies as a plant or dustmite) and didn't want to keep putting off updating, so I hope this brightens your day the way writing it brightened mine. 
> 
> Don't worry, next installment is purely Shinoi.

* * *

Fujita and Ebisu are in the backseat because the former has spent the last few days wallowing in his losing streak on the notional back alley brawling scorecard and insists on witnessing the occupational hazards of being En’s cleaner as a method of coping, while the latter is a mental extension of Fujita’s left foot and simply goes where he goes. Shin momentarily forgets they’re accompanying him after they spend the lapse of time awaiting Noi’s return from the market in anticipatory silence. When she does finally pop open the passenger side door, Ebisu is the first to jolt Shin from his comatose state by exclaiming with the force of a foghorn screech, _“POPCORN!”_

“Yes, Ebisu,” Noi says, and passes the red-striped box to her eagerly out-stretched arms. “And for you, Senpai,” she adds, handing him a sleeve of black garbage bags.

“My brand!”

“Hey, Shin,” Fujita says. “Why do you make Noi buy everything for you?”

“Because he’s broke,” Noi replies, “but he asks nicely.”

Shin scratches at the stubble on his chin through the slit of his mask. “I...do spend quite a lot on personal projects.”

Fujita leans forward on his elbows. “I see you moving wood to your apartment sometimes. Is carpentry what you used to do in Hole?”

One of the things Shin has never lied about: who he was before all this. He’d done his apprenticeship for nearly five years before shit went sideways, and it was an earnest trade, the kind of job that could bring a humble but reliable income. Shin wonders if he can conjure the exact memory of splitting a bento box with his father on the discarded stack of rubble behind the eastern wall, or the color of his shirt or the hard cut of brick under his thighs or the dozens of other little details he was, at least at the time, too young to realize were important.

“Something like that,” he answers finally.

“Are you any good at it?”

“I can get the job done. That’s all that matters.” _A lot like being a cleaner,_ he thinks stiffly. 

Ebisu pulls herself up on the seat and asks, “Noi, is Shin good with his wood?”

Shin seizes in his seat like he’s been shot in the chest.

“Of course,” Noi says, and he spears her with a warning glance. “My Senpai is very talented with his hands.”

“Don’t encourage her behavior, Noi, I’m begging you.”

Ahead of them, at the edge of the intersection connecting their side road to the center of the city’s main square, two figures lumber onto the crosswalk. The men bear the insignia of the Cross-Eyed group that En’s been targeting since their return from Hole (which has recently become quite the enigmatic ordeal for their employer, though Shin enjoys the ramp in his bonuses, and Noi seems to justify the job with childlike sentiments of detective work all the same.)

“Noi,” Shin says sharply, and she follows his gaze to the end of the street. “They’re here.”

“Looks tough,” Fujita mutters. “But I bet you two can handle it, no problem! As professionals. Oh, do you think I could tag along? I want to pick up a few things.”

_“You_ can watch from a safe distance,” Noi says, enthusiastically shoving open the passenger door. “C’mon, Senpai. I want to take the big guy!”

“He looks wide. Try paralyzing him by breaking his fourth vertebrae.”

“No way! A wall like that deserves to have his leg severed at the artery.”

“Just kick his ass,” Ebisu says, reaffirming her lack of fundamental comprehension for their rivalry towards superior methods of execution, and simultaneously ousting herself as a liability on the subject matter. She scoops more popcorn into her mouth.

Fujita says, “You two make me think there’s a lot I don’t know.” Shin supposes that’s true, but then again, he’d had a gratuity of experience at Fujita’s age, and not by choice. “What’s the most important lesson you ever learned?”

That this life is a lot like carpentry: what he can’t lift, carry, or endure, he will simply have to drag.

“To buy seat covers,” Shin says instead, and gets out of the car. “Ebisu always makes such a mess…”


	4. rain

* * *

Shin leans against the hard-chiseled concrete wall, noting that everything in the Hole always feels rougher than the adversely smooth and refined details of the Sorcerer’s world. Red paint splatters the pavement. Splatters again. He has to pinch the bridge of his nose to ward off what he thinks is the nausea of deja vu and comes back to himself only to realize it isn’t red paint at all. 

Noi’s fist impacts their hit’s face for the fourth time and his skull buckles under the strength of it, sending blood and gray matter and bits of brain sluicing in all directions around his head like a macabre halo. The Cross-Eye’s body twitches in death. Shin wonders for a moment if all his limbs will snap closed at the joints like an insect’s.

He says, “Huh. You know something? I think we’re near the old lumber mill.”

Noi straightens up, but she’s sucking in deep breaths. Her chest lifts and falls as if struggling under the weight of a heavy force. “The one you apprenticed at?”

“No. Same district, though.” He glimpses her once over. “You sound exhausted.”

“Don’t worry about me, Senpai.”

Shin turns his eyes upwards. The sky is swollen full of heavy gray clouds. When he reflects on the times he laid in bed all day whenever it rained _—_ subjected to his father’s drastic lectures about resting to recuperate from whatever illness seemed to render him entirely inert on the gloomy days _—_ he feels the nausea return. 

“We should go before it rains,” he says.

Noi crosses her arms over her chest. “The other one got away. You know how my bastard cousin gets when we don’t finish a job.” 

“We can’t hunt him in the storm.”

A benefit of having been with Noi forever is that he can read her expressions through her mask. She’s considering their limited alternatives with the same face she makes when there’s sour candy in her mouth, an oddly specific thing for him to know; a look of mild contempt.

“You lived in Hole, right, Senpai? Let’s find a place to wait it out.”

He runs through his mental catalogue of  _ places _ , all of which feel much closer to the surface of his skin than he’d care to admit, but the details of them have become unreliable in his long years away. He thinks of: hidden joints, hole-in-the-wall bars, underground restaurants, meager shops, marketplaces. Alleys with painted slogans and caricatures from gangs that kill each other and leave the corpses for the rats. Factories. Slums. Mazes of roads with no real address.

Finally he says, “I think I know a spot.”

It takes nearly an hour. He guides them through the spider-leg access tunnels under the stone facets of the city and eventually up a runged ladder to the underbelly of the north end living complex. The rain is beginning to barrel down upon the world. In the distance, it’s already begun churning up the earth.

Shin shoulders in a door to a low-level apartment and ushers Noi inside. He slides the latch lock into place. Outside, the first rainfall descends with full fury across the district. Blackened tides of liquid slosh down the windows and long roads of asphalt, cascading everywhere and everywhere.

Darkness completely envelopes them. The silence is ruptured by a ringing between his ears, and Noi’s sharp intakes of breath.

She asks, “Where are we?”

“My childhood home.”

“Oh. It’s empty.”

“They closed it off during the witch hunt, but they were probably never able to sell it because the walk to the nearest marketplace is a shitty one.” Shin doesn’t think he wants to divulge any other information on the basis that she might not understand the weight of what was lost, but it’s Noi, and he’s made a bad habit of telling her everything. “Besides the fact it’s far, there were plenty of instances of people getting caught in the crossfire of gang wars.”

“Probably brings back memories, doesn’t it, Senpai?” she says to him.

There is one here: the slanted lighting of a swinging bulb, the way it cleaves the shadow through like a guillotine. The scent of wet blood on the floor. The rumbling, methodical laughter from the association at the kitchen table. Shin can’t admit that it still haunts him some days to think he might walk into a parallel nightmare with Noi, and lose her forever.

He shrugs. “Not really. It was a long time ago.”

The windows are boarded up. The floor feels fragile under his feet as they spread out to ensure they’re alone in here, though that comes with the pressupposed understanding of a violent squatter having taken up residence. Regardless, they turn up nothing, and Shin pulls off his mask to tell her, “Sounds like we’re going to be here a while.”

Noi conjures a small flame between her hands to light a lantern she locates on the kitchen counter, one that Shin confirms must have been left behind by the property manager at some point. He wonders if they would make the mistake of coming to claim it. 

The electricity has been shut off for years, most of the furniture is gone aside from the single dust-soaked mattress in the bedroom and a forgotten stool tipped over in the bathroom, and there’s a faint stain on the floor where his father bled to death. He realizes he’s spent too long fixated on it when Noi calls to him from the other room to ask if he's died of dust inhalation.

Shin returns to the bedroom as his partner flips the mattress over, and suddenly immune to conversation, he opens the closet to discover some cheap linens folded on the top shelf. Somehow, there aren’t words exchanged between them, yet they operate in sync as if sharing a single mind: they strip off their jackets and masks and hang them on a nail in the wall, which Shin remembers once supported a picture of his mother. Each memory returns to him with the jabbing, center-focal pain of a wasp sting.

“Are you all right, Senpai?”

He looks at Noi, her concern for him illuminated by the bracket of otherworldly blue light from the lantern at her feet. Her voice is like a shotgun in the dark.

“Of course,” he denies. “Am I not supposed to be?”

“You never gave yourself time to mourn, did you?”

“Didn’t really have the opportunity. Like I said, it was a long time ago.” He breaks their eye contact to shake out the sheet and splay it over the mattress. “Here, get comfortable. I need to look at something.”

He doesn’t specify what. If she wants him to, she doesn’t ask.

Shin returns to the corner of the room where his father was bled like a stuck pig, and he tests his weight on each individual board until one rings hollow. He uproots it. In the hidden compartment, he finds the picture of his parents he couldn’t reclaim after dicing up his own arms, taken somewhere in that uncertain interval between Shin’s birth and his mother’s death. He gazes down at the photo in his frankensteined hands and realizes he doesn’t know where to place himself in his own timeline anymore. 

Noi’s voice reverberates in the recesses of his mind:  _ “Is there someone you would bring back, if you could?” _

He folds the picture into his jacket’s inner pocket and returns to the bedroom. Noi looks at him as he lies on his side, facing away from her. He expects her to say something. To reiterate her concerns. To assure him she won’t tell En about this (but then again, why would she tell that self-absorbed bastard anything? He doesn’t know. He’s focusing on the empty places where his old life used to be).

Instead she pulls close to him and her arm wraps around his waist, remaining quiet despite the questions he knows she wants to ask. He entwines their fingers. Something inside him unknots. He feels water on his face and wonders if he should fix the leak in the roof before they leave this place for good.

Outside, the rain falls and falls.


	5. liquor

* * *

Blue Night ends, unsurprisingly, with an indecent intaking of alcohol that Noi characteristically recovers from in a matter of twenty-something-odd minutes but blesses Shin with the ability to see everything in sets of two, and he finds that the erroneous task of navigating En’s mansion is worsened when the decor is an array of atrocious colors blurred into one funnel of rainbow vomit by the effects of the liquor.

“I can sober you up,” Noi offers, holding him steady as he stumbles on his own feet.

“It’s fine. I—I deserve to suffer the consequences of my hubris.”

Gura-Gura, padding ahead of them, barks at Ebisu innocently crossing the other end of the hall and she darts in the opposite direction. They make it to Shin's apartment in one piece, also surprisingly. He’s telling Noi about things that don’t involve building a house in any capacity when she drops him on his bed but he’s compelled by the influence of his drunken stupor to say, “It’s a lot like a partnership, actually.”

“What’s that, Senpai?” 

“Building something with someone is a commitment. It means...it means you can’t ever go _backwards_.” He props himself up on his elbows to look at her, to find her gazing at him quizzically. “It’s about the investment, but also knowing how fragile it all is. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I think so.” She perches beside him, resting her chin on her hand pensively. “Then, what if—what would it be like if everything went horribly wrong?”

“It doesn’t matter.” He runs his thumb over the back of her shoulder. Bones strengthened by their countless brawls, by the pure concentration of her conviction after losing everything she once built as her own. “We got it right the first time.”

“You have a strange way of conveying your thoughts when you’re drunk, Senpai.”

“Is...that a bad thing?” He tucks a flyaway hair behind her ear, wondering why his fingers insist on violating her personal space, even though her mane is smooth and soft and oh, stars, he hasn’t been this embarrassingly wasted in _years_. He should just do something socially devastating instead, like hold her hand.

Noi takes his wrist and for a moment of bewildered plausibility he wonders if she might break it. Instead she traces the stitching on his knuckles with the featherlight touch of her forefinger, as if connecting the dots between the long years from when they first met to now, or counting backwards the number of days she’s known him, and kisses the middle most scar. His face is too hot.

“Uh—Noi—”

She gives him a small smile. “I’m glad you’re my partner, too, Senpai.”

Her mouth is quite suddenly planted on his. Or maybe _he’s_ the one who closes the space rifting them apart. All the same, he becomes aware of the world grinding to a halt, a type of stillness that exasperates how close he feels to ceasing to exist altogether. He focuses on the pulsing blood in his ears, the slow momentum of her lips, the wet slide of her tongue behind his teeth. 

When she pulls away, he’s left a bit dazed. Her smoke is sobering him up but somehow his mind feels less coherent than before.

“Noi, I…”

“Ssh.” Her tone is off. It makes him realize the days are growing shorter. “Just relax, Senpai. Let me lead.”

There’s such a grace about her he thinks, quite absurdly, that she’s been replaced by a shapeshifter, or is a woman disguised as his partner for the purposes of covert infiltration into En’s impressively underwhelming empire. Except that her touch on his lips belongs to her. Except that he just... _knows_. Knows the same way he knows when the rain is coming to Hole.

Though he doesn’t say this much for lack of a desire to suffer copious amounts of damage to important anatomical organs, he’s familiar with the weight of her body—the size of her presence, the strength of her hands, the accentuated way her mouth collides with his. Possessive. Inquisitive. She’s the type who asks him anything and everything with her tongue, with her teeth, with fingers spearing into his hair. He _feels_ her. Feels the contract in his chest writhing behind the cage of his bones, feels the curiosity in the methodical movement of her hands at his belt as she straddles his waist and tells him without words her every intention.

Shin makes an effort to return the affection. He doesn’t know how she manages to be so all-encompassing but he reflects a margin of her energy, shoving his rough palms up her shirt, taking in all her warm, dry heat. His thumbs circle her nipples and her deep, throaty moan is nearly his undoing.

“Shin,” she utters then, and he gazes up in awe, soaking in the sight of her swollen lips and the sultry, devilish look in her eyes.

“Noi…” He realizes that he’s kept her waiting too long. She needs to occupy her mouth. Her teeth find his earlobe. “Oh, devils below, En’s going to _kill_ me.”

“Who _cares_ what he thinks?”

“My mushroom-infested corpse will when it’s”—she bites into the juncture of his neck, and he hisses out a groan mangled by pain and pleasure—“infested with—mushrooms, and—what the fuck are we even _talking_ about?”

“Don’t know.”

He gets his own teeth on her pulse point and sucks on the bundle of nerves there. Her nails rake down the length of his back. Something in him pulls taut as a string. His contract, he thinks. Reacting to hers, or his heartbeat, and for one intermediate moment between a pulse and a thought, he considers that he might just be _dying_.

_Or—_

Oh. 

Oh, holy shit.

He really is in love with her.


	6. company

* * *

Kasukabe is gone again. 

Shin paces the cavernous halls intertwining the genetic makeup of En’s mansion, emotionally stunted somewhere between being exasperated and being bemused by the good doctor’s exploits. Kasukabe, and by extension his entire group, is relatively harmless despite having the self-preservation tactics of an insect crawling on the lip of a pitcher plant; his genuine capacity for suicidal curiosity steers his course to the edge. There’s no sense of moral superiority in any of it, either. Kasukabe is just a total lunatic.

Shin’s phone buzzes in his pocket and he answers the call without bothering to check the incoming I.D.

“Noi, is everything okay?”

 _“What? Of course.”_ In the background he makes out a cacophony of noise from her television, or what he perceives to be television—there are voices that aren’t familiar to him, drones barely comprehensible enough to pass for conversational rhythm. _“Are_ you _okay, Senpai? You sound—”_

“Doc ran off again.” Because that’s the headache he definitely needs right now. “Doesn’t matter. What’s up?”

_“Come visit me.”_

She lowers her voice an octave when she says this. He tries to decipher the underlying potential for a sexual endeavor, and quietly debates if he can indulge in the distraction either way. (Nothing else has changed between them since Blue Night, except for the increasing consistency she spends nights in his bed. Gura-Gura, too, who has always taken residence by Shin’s legs, poses yet another hazard in the minefield of his morning routine.) 

Fuck it. “Be there in a few.”

He hangs up, cutting off the next thing she tries to tell him. No matter. He'll find out when he gets there.

It takes exactly nine minutes between ending the call and knocking on her room door, not that he’s counting, he’s just made a questionable habit of measuring his time with her in intervals like a work out; sixty-minute sessions. A precious accommodation to their forever frantic schedules. When she lets him in, he gets his mouth on hers and her back to the wall, knocking an older frame from its peg. It clatters to the floor, surviving the drop only on the coincidence that Noi demanded En’s interior decorators line everywhere possible with soft carpeting. Her hands bunch up in his jacket. His thumbs slide up her shirt into the divots of her wide hipbones, where he locates her fluttering pulse and puts his lips on her throat to find the matching beat.

She says, “S-Senpai, wait, I have _—_ I have _company_.”

He goes ramrod straight. 

“Oh.”

Her guests are each respective member of Hole’s group, gathered before the television watching the scene unfold with varying facial displays of wonder and discomfort. Thirteen buries his face in his palms. Kasukabe, looking typically unfazed, casually raises his hand to wave and says, “Hiya, Shin!”

Vaux clarifies, “Noi invited us in.”

Jonson lifts his forelegs. _"Shocking!"_

Shin feels the blood rushing to his face and turns his head away, as if denying his embarrassment could do anything to alleviate the damage done to his pride.

“Noi,” he says placidly, taking her wrist in his hand, “can I see you outside?”

He drags her into the hall while the Hole group re-fixates on whatever program she’s provided. Shin lowers his voice all the same, to an intentionally strained, simmering tone. A glass brimming full of water, ready to spill. “What in all seven levels of _Hell_ compelled you to let them into your _room?”_

“Kasukabe wanted to learn about our culture.” She lowers her voice now too, like exchanging some great big secret between them. “That's what I was trying to tell you. I figured it would at least keep him from wandering the mansion.”

“A _warning_ would have been nice, Noi.”

“I tried, Senpai.” She offers an apologetic smile, which he easily accepts. “I was actually gonna show them En’s autobiography—”

“What, why?"

“Huh?”

“Don't feed them that garbage. I look so starry-eyed in _every_ scene, like I’m in love with—” _Not the right time._ “—murdering people.”

Noi closes their distance apart. “You don’t have to stick around if you don’t want to, Senpai. Besides, there’s always time for us later.” She presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “I’ll make it up to you.”

He flushes, not at all certain what he’s even worked up about anymore. “But why _that_ one? The fucking thing doesn’t have a proper ending, En’s acting is stiff as a board, and the pacing’s all over the place.”

“Ahuh.” 

She’s giving him that shit-eating grin of hers. He’s cracking under the pressure. 

“Weren’t _you_ the one who complained the whole time because you didn’t want to participate in, and I quote, _this stupid fucking project?”_

“Well, yeah,” she says. “All of En’s ideas are stupid, even the fun ones.”

Shin fishes through a mental catalog of excuses to be anywhere but here right now, but he supposes a movie will keep Kasukabe out of trouble for a little bit, at least. They could probably stretch the inevitable conversation into the sociological insight of the realm of sorcerers, maybe feed him and Vaux some spools of off-topic monomanic spiel. Or—and at this point this tactic seems more achievable with less repercussions—they could always let the guy loose in the city and see if he winds up face-down in a ditch somewhere.

Eventually, Shin caves. “Fine. _Fine!_ Let’s watch En’s shitty movie.”

“Yes!” she exclaims in vicious triumph. “Come on Senpai, you can sit next to me!”

And she drags him inside.


	7. match

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A chapter from Noi's perspective for once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UHHHH okay so, hi, I'm not dead! *checks pulse* I think. ahem. Long story short, I didn't have internet access for 15 of the last 25 days but for two entirely different reasons, (one being that it was the annual celebration of my ejection from the womb), and then worked 50 hours a week for three of the last four weeks on top of it, which kinda just absorbed a lot of my free time into the ever endless void of capitalism. 
> 
> Anyway...a special thank you to my valiant readers and reviewers! I'm unable to reply to everyone right now, so take these next chapters as the sincerest form of gratitude that I can conjure as a placebo until I'm back to my regularly scheduled program.

* * *

When Noi hits the mat she feels all the air vacate her lungs with such gusto she can’t intake any for several moments afterwards, as if her diaphragm has forgotten suddenly how to function, and the force of her landing leaves her spread on her back like a beached starfish. Her entire body aches even as the smoke in her system slowly eases the strain of impacting the unmoving floor. In her early years as a Cleaner, it was the kind of soreness she couldn’t heal so easily, one that kept her inert because she didn’t possess the wherewithal to find any reason to stand. Getting back up meant getting put down.

Shin’s visage breaches the aura of the long ceiling lamps above, his arm extended in a display of camaraderie. “What did I say about watching your flank?”

“The grapple doesn’t hold if I don’t brace the weight with my back foot.”

“Oh, so you were listening to me after all.”

“Of course I was! But.” She grins up at him. “Senpai, did you see—I almost got it right that time!”

“You didn’t almost anything. You were being careless again, and you could’ve sprained something important, like your ankle—”

“It’s fine, I’ll heal!”

“That’s not the point, Noi.”

She frowns up at him and accepts his hand, going with the motion of being pulled to her feet. They’re the only two occupying the mansion’s fitness center; the silence between them is dense when they aren’t moving, the air brimming with the thrums of the idle machinery and buzzing overhead lights. They sit on one of the benches and share a bottle of water Shin stirs up with an energy powder that tastes like berries and makes her feel less like collapsing.

“I’m sorry, Senpai,” she says to him. “I’ll do better next time.”

“Why are you apologizing?”

It’s hard to say. She reflects on the first time she went into the gardens to get purposefully lost and came back with a bird who lay dying of old age, a seldom and very special occurrence in the animal kingdom that she, at that size, possessed no prior knowledge of. She considers all the smoke she’d spent trying to encourage it awake as if it had only decided to shut its eyes away from the world for a little while, and learning then to give up the idea of living forever. 

Noi thinks this behavior reflects in Shin, or maybe she’s transposing the guilt of her innocence into his body; his habits of moving forward until he succumbs to the exhaustion of fighting a losing battle. It’s understandable he feels he has to teach her this way when she already knows it so well.

She says, “I couldn’t get it right.”

“That’s because you don’t take anything as seriously as you should.”

When Shin turns his head towards the window in some kind of resignation Noi hasn’t been able to decipher yet, she has a sudden, violent thought: if she were to break open his bones and inspect the inside of his marrow, would she find the truth of him? Or would he be exactly what he presents himself as: this man without dreams?

“Can I ask you something, Senpai?” she says to him, and he hums from his chest, indicating that he’s still listening to her. He always listens to her, even when he pretends to be elsewhere; Noi takes note of that. “Who taught you to fight?”

“You’ve asked me this before,” he tells her, keeping his eyes fixed on a small moonjay that claims residence at the edge of the windowsill, “and I answered you. I’m a natural.”

Noi scoots closer, straddling the bench so that she can fully face him. “I’m being serious.”

Shin finally turns his gaze back to her for a moment, filling her with that exhausted look she’s come to expect from someone worn down by the currents of time. The distance in their age feels to her, somehow, inorganic; like she’s already experienced his transitive tiredness in the bird in the gardens, and even now, years of experience later, still doesn’t know how to fix.

“Hole,” he says finally. “That’s just the kind of place it is. I learned what I had to, and the rest came with experience on the job.”

“Yeah, but you’re good at it. You know where to step, how hard to hit, and all those pressure points like, _everywhere—_ ” She isn’t certain what’s gotten her so excited, but it must be the notion of precision killing, because she’s fucking weird like that. “You make me realize there’s a lot I don’t know.”

“About what?”

Him. The way of the world. The thing is, Shin’s never explicitly told her about what’s happened to him because she’s never asked, and whatever she has pasted together is an ugly amalgamation of the tragic visit to his childhood home and the little details he drops over meals about _old habits_ , whether intentional or not. These are things she can work with if she learns where to begin, where to start making sense of it all, yet a decade has come and gone and the stories of their lives continue to slowly unravel. Noi wonders if she’ll ever know him in all his entirety.

She takes his hand carefully in both of hers, applying the same terrified uncertainty she harbored all those years ago with the dying bird’s body, and tells him, “Can we go again? I’ll get it right this time.”

Her partner sighs. “If I knew you wanted to pin me this badly, I would’ve brought us some wine from the cellar.”

“Shin,” she says firmly, and he looks her squarely in the eye. “I told you I’m being _serious_.” 

Outside the window from where they sit, just two soulbound lives dovetailed by the intersection of choices they’ve made apart and together, the little moonjay spreads its wings and lifts into the open sky. Living forever in the time it's been given. 

“I just need to get it right.”


End file.
